ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the extent of formal authority as an interactional accomplishment. Focusing on situated language use, we examined a conflict between County Clerk Davis and a couple seeking a marriage license by taking two perspectives: one applying discourse and conversation analyses; the other applying the ventriloquial approach. The chapter reviews literature on formality in interaction, authority, and power before the analysis. In the first section we show how discourse analysis reveals how formal authorities are claimed and contested through the use of pronouns, institutional language, framing, politeness, and actions that make relevant situated interactional roles. Then we show how conversation analysis draws attention to sequential features of the interaction, and how dispreferred and disaligning actions are accomplished turn by turn to constitute the conflicted nature of the encounter. We finish the analysis by discussing the ventriloquial approach—which examines the forms of agency that are incarnated through talk and bring to life sources of authority such as people, documents, and ideas—and how this can distribute and redistribute agency upstream to preceding agents rather than locating it in a particular person acting in the present moment. We end the chapter by discussing these analytic methods and what we learn about varieties of formal authority by applying them.
